Bear Your Heart (Alpha Werebear Romance) (Forever Mated Book 1)

by Lynn Red

  It was my Colt. I checked the safety and the cylinder out of habit. Everything was perfectly clean and in good working order, except the bullets weren’t anything I’d ever used before. I pushed down the rod and rolled the shiny little cartridges around in my hand. They were brightly sparkling, and very hard, much more so than regular lead bullets. “Is this silver?” I asked the empty room.

  Or what I thought was an empty room. “Some things about us, you get right in your movies.” Nana Singer tottered into the room. “Is he fighting? Again? How many days have I been out?”

  “Four,” I said quickly. “And yes, there’s a ton of them out there. He said something about how we had to go, and that he was going to clear a path.”

  “Bless his heart,” she said in a way that reminded me very clearly of my grandmother when she’d heard I decided to spend two years in the Peace Corps after high school. “I’m sure he thinks this sort of posturing will impress you, and it might, but he’s going to need some help. They’re wilder than they’ve ever been...more dangerous and wilder. I don’t know how well this will work, but we need a few others. You any good with that thing?” she asked, indicating my pistol with a tilt of her head.

  “Yeah, why?”

  “Good,” she said. “Make sure nothing gets in here while I’m doing this.”

  With that, she began to spin, to sing. This time though, something about her song was different. It was mournful, wailing, and seemed desperate. Then, without a warning, she froze in place.

  “Too late,” she whispered. Her eyes were glassy and wild, and the mop of tangled, trinket-tied hair on her head jingled to a slow stop. “No one’s coming. No one left to come. You say you’re good with that thing?”

  All I could do was nod.

  “Good, then follow me.”

  She waved her hands in semi-circles in front of herself, and what I thought was a window, turned out to be a fully functioning door. With a creaking sound, it swung open. In the darkness, I could hear roars and snarls and pained screeches.

  Inside myself, all I could hear was the dull thud of my heart trying to escape my ribcage.

  8

  “Keep going,” Nana Singer urged me as I leapt over a root, hit my head on an overhanging branch and swore out loud. “Moving, keep moving. Don’t stop, don’t look back, not for a second. Keep that gun ready, but don’t let your feet stop.”

  I have no idea how that old woman kept going, but she seemed to glide over the forest floor, sometimes not even taking steps to keep moving. “Who are they?” I managed to ask, in the middle of dodging an overhead tree branch that could have knocked me straight out if I hadn’t been paying attention. “And why are they trying to kill him? Or us? Or whoever they’re trying to kill?”

  From a distance that was hard to judge with all the trees between us, I heard Ale howl in pain, and then two more desperate wails joined him before being quickly silenced. I didn’t want to know what happened...okay, I sort of did, to be honest. I’d had just about enough of those panthers fucking with my Ale that I didn’t much care what he did to them.

  And that’s the first time I’d thought that. My Ale, I thought with a slight shudder. Why the hell was I thinking about him like that? This wasn’t some stupid date, this wasn’t anything but a survival exercise, this was me trying to stay alive and keep him alive too. And then after all that, there was the bizarre mystery of Nana Singer and her whirling dervish magic, and on top of that there was the face that I was lost in the goddamn woods with people I hadn’t known long enough to invite to my house for dinner.

  “Mortal enemies,” the old woman whispered as she danced through branches. “Centuries, probably longer.” Her voice was disinterested, even relaxed as she bobbed and weaved. “They come, we fight, they go, we live. Every so often one or the other group makes some headway against the other, and its quickly lost without any real damage.”

  “Sounds like Joker and Batman,” I said with a soft laugh. “Going around and around forever and all that.”

  No response came, not that I expected one. She turned back and gave me a smile. There was some color to her face now that she’d been running for a while. I could tell she was a beautiful woman in her younger years, and might have still been if she weren’t approximate as thin as a piece of pine straw.

  “We stop,” she announced from out of absolutely nowhere.

  I thought we’d stop in a clearing, or maybe there was another cabin, or a cave, or a secret hideout that we were heading toward. There’s never any end to surprises, I’ll give ‘em that much. But, no, there was nothing at all remarkable about our surroundings. Just a cold, dark, humid forest that smelled strongly of cedar and pine and earth. I drew my knees up to my chest and hugged my denim-clad legs tight.

  I’m not exactly the most outdoorsy sorta girl in the world. In fact, I avoid it when at all possible, but out here in the silence and the calm with nothing but branches and stars staring down from the heavens where we sat. “Why here?” I finally asked, when the silence grew too heavy. The air felt like it was thickening around us. It reminded me of an old dream I had when I was a kid of a boa constrictor wrapping itself around me and just squeezing. It was like a hug, but a whole lot more intense. At first it was warm, it was comforting and warm but as time went by it became almost unbearably tight.

  “I mean, why’d we stop? I thought we were running to some safe house out in the middle of nowhere to hunker down in.”

  “If only the world worked like that, child, we’d all be safer,” Nana Singer whispered. “But we must wait in a place we can be found. Ale will make his way here, but if he can’t find us, he’ll panic. And if he panics, he might well murder every last panther on the planet to get to you.”

  “Me?” I asked. “Why me?”

  “Hearts work in strange ways,” she began, and paused momentarily as though she was going to say something else, but was interrupted by a distant crashing sound. Someone was coming, that much was clear.

  Nana Singer glided over to me, and stood near enough that I could feel the paper-thin legs underneath her massive skirts. “Stay still,” she whispered, “until we’re sure.”

  “Of what?” I asked, starting to get irritated. “We just sit here and don’t do anything until whatever is crashing through that thicket of trees gets to us and—”

  “I’m glad I found you,” Ale announced as he stumbled into our little area, much closer than I thought was possible. After all, he was banging around in the woods, and then just sort of appeared beside us. “They’re on my tail, uh, so to speak.”

  His ursine form was admittedly lacking a tail, but it was kinda funny nonetheless. “We don’t have much time. I hate to do this, but,” he crouched down and what was left of his humanity swirled and disappeared into a shape that was so close to a bear that there were very few differences, except this one was a color I’d never seen on a bear, and his snout was slightly shorter. He didn’t have lips, not really, but he was still vaguely able to speak.

  “On,” he grunted. “God, I hate this.”

  Nana Singer hopped on, and stuck out her hand. “No choice,” she whispered. “Don’t make this any worse.”

  I grabbed her hand and swung up onto Ale’s massive back, squeezing his sides with my sides. The heat of him between my legs gave me a feeling of safety, though the whole thing was so utterly impossible I could hardly take any refuge in any of it.

  “Hold on,” Ale grunted. “This won’t be fun.”

  At first it was hard to believe that riding a giant bear through the woods wasn’t going to be at least a little bit of a kick. But then, without any warning, Ale dove into life, blasting through the woods. Not five seconds later, the crashing resumed. There was hardly a second’s worth of rest before the black forms emerged into the area we’d just been sitting in. We didn’t have an instant’s worth of breathing time before they were on us. I felt hot jets of breath on the backs of my legs.

  Instead of words there were only snarls,
snorts and snaps. Every so often, I felt teeth brush the back of my legs, and when that happened, Ale usually kicked his back legs and threw his head around, I expect to try and knock whatever was attacking him away.

  I say ‘whatever was attacking him’ like I don’t know.

  I don’t know how or why, but that inky-haired, blue-eyed monster was hot on our heels. If we didn’t manage to get away, and fast—very fast—we’d be as dead as a lumberjack who had a pine fall on him. “Hold on,” Ale whispered to the pair of us as he leapt over a root, and spun around a tree trunk, which somehow forced one of the panthers to crash into it face first. The thing let out a yelp and a snarl, and then fell silent.

  Ale was limping. It wasn’t very dramatic, and it wasn’t terribly serious, but still he was limping.

  But then, it became serious. He fell in a heap. I looked down and instead of bravely striding forward like he’d been doing Ale was clutching an ankle that looked very nasty. Something had happened, but I hadn’t had the presence of mind to notice what. Instead, I decided to stop caring.

  The hot breath that snaked up my legs was so brutally hot and dangerous that I could have almost died even if no one actually grabbed me.

  And then I remembered the gun.

  I didn’t have to reach. I knew where it was.

  The handle felt like a grip on reality. “Don’t wait!” Ale grunted. “Unless you want to be chewed up like kitty kibble, you might want to start shooting.”

  Nana Singer’s eyes had gone white when I looked in her direction and even though I was so nervous my hands were shaking, I wasn’t any stranger to popping off a few rounds. The panthers circled. As they did, I could see their yellow eyes burning holes in the darkness. They were like tiny, jaundiced stars, and the longer I watched them, the more impossible it became to look away. They continued prowling around us, and I couldn’t manage to rip myself away from the gaze.

  “Ami! You gotta do this, and you gotta do it now!” Ale shouted, as he clutched his ankle.

  Unconsciously, I stuck my tongue out between my teeth and bit down to steady my nerves. My hands still shook, but only minutely. Suddenly, a grim sense of satisfaction came over me. “You can do this,” Ale urged me, his voice even and calm even though I’m sure he was in horrible, hellish pain. His ankle wasn’t just turned as I thought before, it was pretty clearly, and badly, broken. He was dragging us in the same direction we’d been running, but it wasn’t fast, and it certainly wasn’t going to be enough to get us out of trouble.

  His words sent another trickle of warmth through my body that radiated out from my core to the tips of my fingers and toes. I shook my head and bit my tongue again, hard enough to get a shot of pain that shook me out of the odd hypnosis those yellow eyes sunk me into.

  I lifted my gun, pointed it right in between a pair of eyes and squeezed off a round. The blast was the only light in the woods that didn’t come from stars or eyes, and was so blindingly bright that my head immediately started to ache.

  I fired again, lifting a panther off his feet and sent him flying backward until his canine body wrapped around the trunk of a pine tree like a limousine in a car wreck. Two more shots sent another one scattering, and two more missed, but scared one more away from Ale’s broken ankle. He wrenched around and took a swipe, ripping a bloody tear into the last one. They were all scattering, but only one was dead.

  As they retreated, and Ale dragged us on, the realization dawned on me that this was going to be a long, long night.

  9

  “This is certainly an interesting place,” I said as we walked slowly into an abandoned hunter’s shed that both Nana Singer and Ale seemed slightly wary of entering. Their nervousness rubbed off on me, though I’m not entirely sure why that was. They had a look of confusion on their faces that didn’t fade when we settled in. Well, as much ‘settling in’ as you can do in a dusty, dank, ancient cabin with floorboards you could stick a finger between and still have room to move.

  “Looks like it came out of an old western movie, only it never got, you know, renovated. Why are we here?”

  “It’s safe,” Ale said, wiping the back of his hand across his eyes to clear out some of the dirt and leafy debris that he’d gotten in them while stomping through the woods. “At least it is for now. Who knows what’ll happen during the night.”

  I sat there staring at Ale and then out the window, going back and forth between them. Nana Singer had curled herself up on one of the cots that dotted the large, single-room cabin, and did so with such gentle agility that the ancient canvas and wood structure didn’t so much as squeak under her weight. The thought crossed my mind that if I tried sitting on one, it would make more noise than I’m comfortable admitting.

  “You’re worried,” Ale said, breaking the silence that I hadn’t noticed settled uncomfortable over the room. “And I can’t say I blame you, but...”

  He stood from where he’d been sitting on the floor then, and stuck his hand out to me. “Come here, there’s something I want to show you.”

  When I took his hand, it was softer than I imagined it could have been. Someone like him, I expected calluses and roughness, and there was a bit of that, but there was also a soft gentleness that even in the short time we’d known one another, I came to associate with this unlikely creature.

  He let me go in front of him and rested his other hand on the small of my back where the heat radiating out of his palm warmed me to the core. “Out there,” he whispered. “I need to get some air, and I think it’d be good for you, too. I can’t take any more of these cooped up, dingy cabins.”

  “You got that right,” I answered in a similar whisper. “I don’t think I’ve ever been inside for this long in my life. I mean, notwithstanding the fight with demon panthers, which don’t get me wrong, I’m not sad about missing.”

  At that, he chuckled softly. “They aren’t demons. Well, not really. Sometimes the world gets a little blurry on the whole demon thing, and I can’t keep it all straight.” He stuck a hand out, popping the front screen door open. It was so old that the frame was warped enough to make it stick heavily when closed. It squeaked loudly, enough so that I winced.

  “Won’t that alert them?” I asked. “Or is it not that sort of thing? I, uh...shit I’m really confused. There’s so much happening at once that I can hardly make sense of it. I mean, I still haven’t entirely come to terms with the fact that there’s this other, entirely bizarre world that just lives slightly under the surface of my regular old world. You know what I mean?”

  “It’s hard for me to understand,” he said, “as I’ve been part of it my whole life. To be honest with you, your world is stranger than mine. Take that hospital business for example. Why do sick people go and congregate there?”

  I almost swallowed my tongue. Of all the strange questions I’d never considered, that one was so odd that it never even occurred to me to think of. “Well,” I started, but then sort of just waggled my lips like a just-caught bass. “I mean, it’s...you know, a hospital. You just kind of...”

  Ale burst out in one of those beautiful, deep-chested, rounded laughs that made me smile even if I didn’t understand what the hell he was laughing at or that I was smiling at. It didn’t take long before I slipped my hand back into his, and then he turned to face me. “What do you think of that?” he asked. “And, oh yeah, I know what hospitals are. We were all there because we’d heard the panther leader had been lurking around the place to try and steal a bunch of medicine and medical supplies to patch up his brothers.”

  He added it as such an afterthought that it took a second to register. “Wait, what?” I asked. “He was there to steal things? Then why was he just sitting in that room? And why did you run when you saw him?”

  Catching my eyes, Ale’s were twinkling in a way that hypnotized me for a moment. I shook my head, and kept asking questions I’d wanted answers to for a while. “And what was going on with that car wreck and the cops not letting you help me? None of this ma
kes any sense.”

  He cleared his throat and looked past me, then turned his head up to the sky for a short moment. “It’s a hell of a story,” he admitted. “As far as the hospital goes, I got a bad feeling when I saw him just sitting there in that room. I can’t explain it, not really, but sitting around doing nothing is not a thing panthers tend to do. In fact, it’s such an out of character thing, I thought he might do something really stupid. And it was too late to stop the theft anyway. The point of me being there was to stop them gathering the meds they need, but he already had them.”

  Ale took a deep breath and absent mindedly stroked the back of my hand with his thumb. The motion, and the simple gentleness of it relaxed me in a way that reminded me of rubbing an alligator’s belly. “As far as the wreck, it just happened. None of us are particularly great drivers, as you can tell from the fiery explosion our attempt became. We were trying to catch them, to head them off before they could get the supplies back to the rest of the clan. See, we’d just had a massive fight, and finally managed to do some real damage to them, and we needed to follow up.”

  I watched his face, and was surprised to see him wince slightly when he’d finished the story. Something more was back there, something deeper under the surface that he hadn’t told me. “What aren’t you telling me?” I asked softly. “There has to be some reason you and the panthers keep having this back and forth, ridiculous, deadly struggle. And it ain’t just because that’s how nature is, or something.”

  Ale laughed. “Yeah, there’s a lot there to unpack. Look up for a second. I need an intensity break.”

  “My God,” I whispered, “I’ve never seen the sky look like that.”

  My breath wouldn’t come for a moment. The entire night sky, a black sheet stretched out into infinity above us, was only visible through a hole in the canopy probably fifty feet around. It was like looking at a painting through a hole you poked in a paper plate. Somehow, it seemed to focus the intensity of the lights above us. I huddled down against Ale’s massive, heat-radiating body without thinking about what I was doing. A chill wind blew through, and he put his arm around my shoulders, and pulled me closer. “My dad,” he finally said as we both stared at the sky.